


what's a girl to do

by nobody_nowhere



Series: maybe you'll stay with me [1]
Category: NXT, Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: F/F, Gen, and mostly it's just Emma being protective, to be fair it's kind of more pre-relationship than actual relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-08 04:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6839011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nobody_nowhere/pseuds/nobody_nowhere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre/developing-relationship short; in which Emma has given up on caring and friendship, and everything else that brought her to ruin the first time around. Or so she thinks, until Dana loses to Asuka at Takeover: Respect, and Emma finds herself faced with the unexpected revelation of just how much she actually has grown to appreciate the other woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what's a girl to do

**Author's Note:**

> hi hello it's been a while, hasn't it? like, almost two years kind of 'a while', whoops. 
> 
> anyway, life/uni happened, I'm slowly catching up on old NXT episodes, and halfway between Respect and London, I suddenly realised just how much I am in love with these two evil girlfriends who are so supportive of each other that they don't actually realise they're in over their head until one of them gets beaten so badly that she loses her memory of even having lost the match at all*. and then Dana debuted on Raw/Smackdown this week and I got inspired to write something for these two, so yeah. have a silly little story, I guess.
> 
> *also you should probably watch this wonderful little clip (assuming you haven't already seen it) if you're curious at all about Dana's apparent memory loss because holy shit it's just - the best thing, honestly ---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJAx8LsXHHk

It’s strange, Emma decides, leaning over Dana as the trainer moves about in the familiar, fussy dance that is routine medical procedure. Strange that she’s come to this point again, where she’s found someone she might care about enough to call a friend.

After the debacle that was her time on the main roster, she’d made her return to NXT in the hopes that she could salvage – something, anything, that would make the brass deem her worthy of the opportunities she’d never been afforded the first time around.

If playing nice and accepting the scraps she was given with nary a complaint brought her to this point, she'd decided, then clearly she needed to try another tack. And so she had; aimless apathy falling away to be replaced with a kind of focus she hadn’t realised she was missing until she found it for what felt like the first time. It wasn’t the first time, or she wouldn’t ever have come to NXT in the first place - but it feels like it all the same.

While the commentators scratched their heads and speculated pointlessly as she humiliated Bayley, taunting her with mimicry and mockery only to draw her out for assault after vicious assault, Emma could only grin. _This_ was what she was missing the first time around – the realisation that kindness gets you nowhere and only the truly selfish have the drive and self-absorption to reach their hands out for whatever they can take, and never mind the bodies they have to climb over along the way.

Bayley was nice, and so she became the half-forgotten ghost of the ‘Four Horsewomen’, left alone to pale into insignificance in the shadow of the others as they thrived and achieved without her. Sami Zayn was trusting, and all it got him was an injury, while Kevin Owens rose to title reign after title reign, first in NXT and then on the main roster.

The crowds booed her and the fans turned on her; commentary (apart from Corey) maligned her and the other wrestlers side-eyed her when they weren’t actively avoiding her – but Emma had never felt so alive.

And then she met Dana Brooke.

“Check her,” Emma says, hovering anxiously as the trainer shines the penlight in her eyes. “I mean, I knew this was going to be rough, but – she…how is she?”

“Ssh,” the trainer says absently, “I need quiet to check her out, please.”

“That eye,” Emma continues, ignoring the request. “That eye does not look good. Dana? Dana? Check the other eye – _Dana_? She’s not even responding.”

She tries not to be _too_ obvious in her worry, but it’s hard, with Dana lying there so quiet and unresponsive and utterly – un- _Dana-like_ , and she can only be thankful that the trainers don’t tend to gossip, because the last thing she needs is someone trying to use this against her; trying to use her - _caring_ against her.

“How do you feel?” the trainer murmurs, ignoring Emma as Dana slowly starts to stir. Her brows furrow, eyes squinting against the light as she struggles to rise. “Do you – remember anything?”

Dana manoeuvres herself into a sitting position, reaching to grasp Emma by the arm and peer up at her, disorientation fading into a bright kind of expectation. “How’s Asuka?” she asks, cheerful and anticipatory, and Emma has just enough time to realise that something is really, really wrong before Dana continues with, “How fast did I beat her? I beat her, really fast!”

“Uh-huh,” Emma says, flicking a brief, worried glance towards the trainer before looking back at Dana. “Yeah, it was really quick.”

The trainer, thank – whatever benevolent deity might be looking on from above, is smart enough to pick up on Emma’s unspoken cue. She gently eases Dana back until she’s lying down once more, even as Dana continues to bask in the light of her presumed victory. The trainer says something about checking Dana’s neck – misdirection, Emma assumes, since the damage is clearly to her memory, but she’s interrupted before she can say anything.

Reassuring, comforting, falsely positive; she’s not sure which it would have been. But it hardly matters, as a blur of obnoxiously bright colour resolves into the figure of Asuka. The other woman saunters over, so confident and self-assured that it half-makes Emma want to claw Asuka's eyes out – but the memory of the way Dana had fallen to sickening kicks and eventually that awful submission hold is still playing over and over again in her head, like a one-track repeat.

Asuka grins, bright and smug and strangely predatory, and reaches out. “Ooh, Dana,” she coos, patting the top of her fallen opponent’s head in a vile mockery of Dana’s usual taunt, and it’s almost more terrifying than the horrible grimace – Emma refuses to call it a smile – that she’d been sporting after Dana had so emphatically rejected any overtures of niceness at the beginning of the match. "Oh, no."

“That – that was Asuka,” Dana says, after a moment in which Emma watches uncomfortably as the oddly terrifying Japanese interloper makes her exit, as quiet and unobtrusive as the manner in which she’d entered. “But I beat her!”

It’s strange, Emma thinks, gesturing to the trainer once more as Dana tries to twist around to stare after Asuka. Strange that she cares when she swore she’d never let herself do so again; how she doesn’t mind nearly as much as she probably should.

Strange how she doesn’t actually mind at all.

\--

There’s a part of her that wonders whether she’s done the right thing by evading all Dana’s questions about the match at Takeover: Respect, and that part begins a full-blown panic when she hears the other woman’s distinctive accent cut clear across the commotion of the catering room.

“What are you talking about? I didn’t _lose_ ,” Dana protests forcefully, as Emma barges past Enzo and Carmella. She’d make a mental note to apologise, but that would imply she actually cares what either of them think about her. She arrives to find her friend planted squarely in front of Jason Jordan and Chad Gable, hands on her hips and fire in her eyes. “I beat her – Emma, tell them I beat Asuka.”

“Why bother?” she asks breezily, snaking an arm through Dana’s and wrapping a hand around her elbow, the better to tug her away from the potential confrontation. “Don’t waste your time, Dana. You’re better than these losers, anyway.”

Emma tosses a pointed glare over her shoulder as Dana lets herself be led away, one that promises a stern talking-to in the future. To his credit, Jordan meets her eyes levelly – not as intimidated as she would have preferred, but nor does he seem openly derisive, so it will have to do.

For his part, Gable barely seems to be paying attention, probably too caught up in something else. His tag-team partner, maybe – it doesn’t seem such an unreasonable guess, given the way they tend to look at each other, and touch each other, and conduct their promos, and then there was that whole thing where Gable was pretty relentless in pursuing Jason Jordan as a tag-team partner in the first place…

She’s not sure, and honestly doesn’t really care. As long as they’re not mocking Dana, they don’t matter. Nothing matters but her and Dana and the path they’re going to carve through NXT and then the main roster, and if that means running interference with anyone inclined to harass Dana about her match with Asuka, then that’s just what Emma will do.

Dana manages to contain herself until Emma can get them to a quiet, out-of-the-way hallway not too far from the various locker rooms. It’s…actually impressive that she manages to wait that long, because Dana is definitely _not_ a patient woman. It’s also flattering, in a way, that the other woman thinks that Emma is worth waiting for.

“Emma? What’s going on? Why does everyone think that I lost to Asuka at Takeover?”

“Because you did lose,” Emma says softly. Almost gently, really, and she’d thought she’d forgotten how to be something as useless and unnecessary as _gentle_. “But it – it’s okay, really. Obviously, it would be better if you had beaten her, but it’s _fine_. We can work with this.”

“We…can?” Dana sounds confused, like she’s not quite finished processing the fact of her loss. It’s a good thing, though, because clearly the best way to deal with this is by continuing on anyway, as if the outcome of the match doesn’t matter. As if they can, through simple action, turn wishes into reality, and make the match as irrelevant as they need it to be. “Are you sure about that?”

“Of course I am,” Emma says brightly, planting her hands on Dana’s shoulders and tilting her head to look directly into the other woman’s eyes. “So Asuka won one match. So what? It was bound to happen, statistically speaking, and now that she’s got that win out of her system, she’ll never get that lucky again. After all, there’s two of us and only one of her.”

“So what are we going to do, then?”

“Make her life a misery, of course. She doesn’t get to get away with that – that ridiculous stunt that she pulled at Takeover, okay? Who does she think she is, just waltzing in like she owns the place and trying to make a name on _our_ backs? I think Asuka needs to learn just who rules this women’s division, and it certainly isn’t her.”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Dana says, and now the confusion is gone from her face as a self-satisfied smirk takes its place. “Playtime is _over_.”

Emma takes a moment just to admire the effect, because _she_ did that – she made Dana smile.

They’ve managed to neatly avoid any sort of self-doubt or denial over the loss to Asuka; Dana too focused now on revenge to worry about ever feeling down about losing in the first place, and Emma’s just ready to make Asuka _hurt_. Maybe not alone, because Asuka is clearly possessed by a demon or – something; honestly, nobody should move like _that_ in the ring, with strikes so hard as to just about bowl herself over from the force and transitions too seamless to see, let alone anticipate.

But it is what it is and Asuka is only one woman, while Dana and Emma are a team. A duo, united in their derision for everyone else, their particular hatred of this unwelcome interloper from Japan – and their mutual admiration for and appreciation of one another, which is perhaps the most important thing of all.

“Playtime is most definitely over,” Emma agrees, with a smile of her own. “Asuka is going down. And you and I? We’re going straight to the top where we belong.”


End file.
